Book Six, Chapter 16: The Road to Hell is Paved with Pizza Dough

I had to drag Isaac along as soon as we went Off-Screen so that we could confirm an actual plan.

We had talked about the inevitability of going into hell for a rescue. After all, if we didn’t rescue anyone, we wouldn’t get rescue tropes even if we won.

I had put it off because we didn’t actually know what we were dealing with in terms of risks.

What was the fate worse than death? Was it simply entering hell? If that was the case, then Isaac might have been safe, relatively speaking, to just dive right in.

But if something happened to you there, something that affected your mind or your body, if there was torture of some kind, we needed to know about it. This was a comedy, so I didn’t expect the worst. But I did like to prepare for it.

Luckily, I knew just the guy to talk to. He was hiding in the break room.

I was glad that when we found him, we didn’t immediately go On-Screen.

“We need you to give Isaac a quick rundown on hell,” I said.

“Is that all?” Camden asked. “I’ve been searching for ways to figure out how demons do their tricks, what kind of clues there might be… but I guess I can take a break. I might have to review my notes, though.”

Of course, when he said ‘review his notes,’ he meant to review the red wallpaper, where all his observations and clues were collected neatly and organized by topic, thanks to Red Thread Theory.

He started to read off everything he knew about hell within the theology and folklore of this storyline. We talked for a bit about how he should deliver that, as I waited for the countdown timer.

Camden had to crawl out of his little hole. We didn’t want this scene to include him in his hiding spot; it might spoil a later scene we had planned. He would occasionally leave it to go film a scene, actually working up front at the cash register, but then he would return to his little hidey hole.

So we sat outside on our breaks, on the curb around the side of the store where we wouldn’t get seen.

On-Screen

Camden folded a piece of pizza in half and held it up above him, lowering it down into his mouth as he said, “What do you mean, you want me to tell you about hell? Do you think I’ve been?”

“You go to church,” Isaac said. “Like, what is hell about?”

I stood back at a distance, like I was too nervous to participate. Too embarrassed to let anyone know that I was seriously contemplating the existence of a hellish parallel world beneath us.

Camden chewed on his pizza. “Well, that depends,” he said. “In church, it’s just the bad place. The place you don’t want to go. So you do good, so you can go to the good place.”

Isaac tapped his foot while thinking. “What if I’m not talking about that? What if I’m talking like… a physical place? Like a trap.”

Camden was stuffing his face with another bite of pizza, and he paused to look at Isaac.

“Ohh, you mean that kind of hell,” he said, pizza still in his mouth. He chewed quickly, fanning his tongue from the pain of eating hot pizza. “Like in the old stories.”

“Stories?” Isaac asked.

“You know, like legends. Mythology. Folklore. I’ve been reading about them after those things tried to abduct you. Where demons try to trick you into hell. Usually, it is just like a hole in the ground that leads to some other place. Some terrible place. That sort of thing.”

The actual term within the canon was “hell hole,” but that sounded too on the nose, so we were shy about using it.

“Hole in the ground,” Isaac repeated. He looked up at me, and I looked back at Camden, even though I wished he hadn’t looked at me in the first place. I wasn’t supposed to be important.

“Say more about that,” he said.

“Well, they’re like little underground kingdoms where demons reigned supreme, right? They’re a mockery of the above-ground, of the realm of Elidel. I mean, these are old folk stories, that type of thing. They used to tell them around the fire back in the medieval days. We don’t know how much is real and how much is just entertainment.”

“Could there be one in a pizza parlor?” Isaac asked.

Camden looked at Isaac and seemed to be contemplating something.

“Look, buddy,” he said. “I know something freaky is going on here, but maybe you should take a step back. Whatever’s happening, it’s best we don’t lose our heads, you know? I’m surprised you even came in today.”

“I had to come in,” Isaac said. “I have to go save Avery.”

“From hell? Like, you think a literal hell is in the pizza parlor?” Camden asked. He seemed to think about that, giving it the weight that the question deserved. After all, his subplot was about figuring out the details of a demon deal. He couldn’t balk at the idea that there was a mini-hell within spitting distance.

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“You think that there is a hell-world below the pizza parlor, and you want to go there to save a woman who probably doesn’t even remember your name?”

“She remembers my name! She said hello several times,” Isaac said.

“I think that you focused on the wrong part of that question,” Camden said. “Look, these little hell-worlds were thought to be allegorical. But if we take the stories literally, what you would expect to find would be a sort of cave, right? Or a dungeon. But it wouldn’t look like that.”

“It looks like the pizza parlor. The demons are wearing suits that look like the animatronics in the store. There’s pizza everywhere,” Isaac said. “I saw it in my dream.”

I stared at Isaac because my character had been having similar dreams, and I was trying to shoehorn in a disbelief angle.

“Were you being chased?” I asked.

“No,” Isaac said. “But Avery was.”

That would be my entire contribution to the scene. Carousel had been trying to tempt me to take a bigger role. If I did, every other player would miss out on some rewards. I would just have to take the hit to my rewards.

“Look, we’re onto something here,” Camden said. “I think I know what they’re up to.”

“What is it?” Isaac asked.

“Well, if your theory is right that there’s a hell underneath the pizza parlor, then that’s probably why they made the deal with Gus Senior in the first place. They needed access to our realm. It has something to do with sin eating. I don’t know what yet.”

“What eating?” Isaac asked.